Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

A Global Constrained Optimization Method for

Designing Road Networks with Small Diameters
Teng Ma1 and Yuexian Hou1 and Xiaozhao Zhao1 and Dawei Song1,2
1
Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application, Tianjin University,
2
The Open University
1
China, 2 UK
mateng1989@foxmail.com, {krete1941, 0.25eye, dawei.song2010}@gmail.com
Abstract

1) different objectives; 2) different stakeholders involved; 3)

interdependencies between choice and investment; 4) short
term versus long term; 5) long term uncertainties in demand;
6) short term uncertainties; and so on [Snelder, 2010].
Traditionally, we can divide the network design problem into two classes: the Discrete Network Design Problem (DNDP) and the Continuous Network Design Problem
(CNDP). The difference between these two problems is the
value area of decision variables. The decision variables of
DNDP are either 0 or 1, while the decision variables of CNDP
can change continuously in an interval. To be specific, the
DNDP concerns about the additions of road segments to an
existing transport network, and the CNDP mainly concerns
about the improvements of road segments to an existing transport network. However, the Network Design Problem may be
a mixed form, and its decision variables can be both discrete
and continuous. This means that the road network designer
should consider improving and adding the roads simultaneously rather than separately. This question can be named as
the Mixed Network Design Problem (MNDP) [Yang and Bell,
1998]. In this paper, we focus on the general MNDP.
The designer needs to set up an objective in advance of designing the road network. There are several objective functions that have been used for this purpose. A lot of researchers assume that the travel demand between each origindestination pair on the network is given. However, the travel
demand varies in the short term as a result of accidents, road
work, bad weather conditions, events, seasonality, and so on.
Meanwhile, the long term demand is uncertain. Whats more,
if we add capacity in the network, the travel times change,
and hence the choices of the travelers change as well. The
choices made by travelers contain: location choice, trip departure choice, destination choice, mode choice, departure
time choice and route choice [Snelder, 2010]. In some cases,
the uncertain demands and changeable travelers choices make
it unimpressive and inappropriate to use a given demand from
each origin to each destination to design road network.
In this paper, we propose the method that designs the road
network in a macro perspective irrelevant to the pair-wise
demands. To this end, the minimization of network travel
time diameter, with respect to certain constrains, becomes
our main objective for road network designing. We define
the travel time diameter of the road network as below:

The road network design problem is to optimize

the road network by selecting paths to improve or
adding paths in the existing road network, under
certain constraints, e.g., the weighted sum of modifying costs. Since its multi-objective nature, the
road network design problem is often challenging
for designers. Empirically, the smaller diameter
a road network has, the more connected and efficient the road network is. Based on this observation, we propose a set of constrained convex models for designing road networks with small diameters. To be specific, we theoretically prove that
the diameter of the road network, which is evaluated w.r.t the travel times in the network, can be
bounded by the algebraic connectivity in spectral
graph theory since that the upper and lower bounds
of diameter are inversely proportional to algebraic
connectivity. Then we can focus on increasing the
algebraic connectivity instead of reducing the network diameter, under the budget constraints. The
above formulation leads to a semi-definite program,
in which we can get its global solution easily. Then,
we present some simulation experiments to show
the correctness of our method. At last, we compare
our method with an existing method based on the
genetic algorithm.

Introduction

Nowadays, the urban traffic is becoming more and more congested with the traffic demand growing greatly. The congestion can be alleviated by designing more reasonable road networks. This designing is the so-called Network Design Problem (NDP). The Network Design Problem mainly focuses on
making the optimal decision on the expansion of the road network in response to an increasing demand for travel [Yang
and Bell, 1998]. Designing road network is often a hard task
since various aspects have to be taken into account, such as:

This work is partially supported by the Chinese National Program on Key Basic Research Project (973 Program, grant no.
2013CB329301) and Natural Science Foundation of China (grants
no. 61070044 and 61272265).

Definition 1.1 the travel time diameter D of a road network

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is defined as the maximum among all shortest travel time between any possible origin-destination pairs (O-D pairs).

get the global solution.

In Definition (1.1), the diameter is defined with respect to

the travel time, which is different to the common definition
with respect to the hop number. Obviously, when the travel
time diameter of the road network gets smaller, the connectivity, measured by time, of road network becomes closer,
then the residents can travel in the network much more conveniently. Hence the smaller travel time diameter is a reasonable universal goal of road network design problem. However, it is difficult to solve this problem directly. In this paper,
we convert the problem from minimizing the travel time diameter to maximizing the algebraic connectivity in spectral
graph theory, which can be solved globally by semi-definite
program.
The rest of this paper is presented as follows. We first
briefly introduce several related works in the field of road network design in Section 2. In Section 3, the fundamentals of
spectral graph theory relevant to our purpose are listed, then
we prove the relationship between the travel time diameter
and the algebraic connectivity of the network. We also describe a principled way to increase the algebraic connectivity.
In Section 4, we propose the models to solve the road network
design problem with respect to some scenarios. We present
the experimental results of our models in Section 5 and conclude in Section 6.

3.1

Theoretical Justifications
Notations and Definitions

Each road in the network has a capacity, which may be determined by its speed limit, geometric design, number of lanes,
number of traffic lights and other road characteristics. As the
majority of roads are two-way and the road characteristics of
two reverse direction street in a road are quite similar, we can
model the road network by an undirected graph G = (V, E).
We use the following notation to facilitate our discussion:
n = |V |: the number of the nodes in the graph.
m = |E|: the number of the edges in the graph.
we > 0: the weight on the eth edge e {1, 2, . . . , m}. A
weight can also be indexed by node pairs as the following.
wij 0: the weight on the edge between node i and node
j where i, j {1, 2, ..., n} (if no edge connects node i and j,
wij = 0).
te > 0: the travel time of the eth edge e {1, 2, . . . , m}.
vi : the ith node of the network.
The nodes in the graph represent the intersections of the
road network, and the edges represent the road; The nonnegative weights represent the capacity of the roads, and a larger
weight indicates a higher capacity. We hypothesize that the
travel time on each road is proportional to the road length and
the inverse of road capacity. Hence the travel time function is
road length
given by travel time = road
capacity .

Related Work

The road network design problem has been studied extensively in decades. Researchers have proposed many models
on designing road network with several different objectives.
[Antunes et al., 2003] designed a road network with maximal
accessibility, where accessibility can be generically defined
as the potential of opportunities for interaction between cities
of regions [Hansen, 1959]; [Feng and Wu, 2003] used the equity to be the objective function to design road network, and
covered equity of accessibility or travel cost for cities as well
as the equity of budget allocation among the cities; [Snelder,
2010] focused on designing robust road network; In [Meng
and Yang, 2002], they mainly considered about the benefit
distribution and equity problem in designing road network.
Moreover, the prevailing objective function can be the total travel cost, which has been used by many articles. A general framework for this problem is bi-level: the upper-level
is the investment decision-making behavior of the transport
planners and designers; the lower-level represents the users
route choice behavior responding to the controls. However,
this framework is a nonconvex programming problem, and
most of the methods based on bi-level framework failed to
find the global optimum. [Suwansirikul et al., 1987] proposed
an alternative heuristic method called the equilibrium decomposed optimization algorithm to solve the problem. [Zhang
et al., 2008] proposed a method based on the genetic algorithm. Unlike traditional methods, this algorithm can get a
global solution to the problem. Recently, some methods reformulated the bi-level framework as a single level problem.
[Li et al., 2012] transferred the network design problems into
a sequence of single level concave programs, to which we can

3.2

Fundamentals of Spectral Graph Theory

In this section, we review some fundamentals of spectral

graph theory, which is the basis of our method. Spectral graph
theory has a long history and a lot of articles concerning about
it [Fiedler, 1973][Chung, 1997] [Boyd, 2006].
The Graph G can be described by its Laplacian matrix. The
weighted Laplacian (matrix) is the n n matrix L defined as:
P
wik
if i = j,

k6=i
Lij =
(1)
wij if i and j are adjacent,

0
otherwise.
We denote the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix L as:
1 2 n
The second smallest eigenvalue 2 of the Laplacian matrix L
is the algebraic connectivity, which can measure how wellconnected the graph is. The corresponding normalized eigenvector (w.r.t, 2 ) is called the Fiedler vector f.
Next we list several basic properties of L as below:
(1) 1 = 0;
(2) L is positive semidefinite;
(3) 1 is the eigenvector corresponding to 1 , where 1 is the
vector with all components be one;
(4) fT 1 = 0.

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3.3

As fT 1 = 0, then

An Intuitive Illustration on the Meaning of

Algebraic Connectivity 2

In order to illustrate the meaning of algebraic connectivity

2 , three toy road networks are shown in Table 1. R1 represents the original road network, where the weight of each
edge represents the capacity of the road. R2 and R3 represent
two different modified networks for R1. The length of each
road is assumed to be one. The travel time diameter D and
algebraic connectivity 2 of each graph are shown in Table 1.
No.

Road Network

So there exists a node u satisfying

f (u) f (vmax ) < 0
Let P denote the shortest path in the road network joining u
and vmax .
Since L is real symmetric, we can express the algebraic
connectivity 2 in terms of Rayleigh quotient [Horn and
Johnson, 1985] of L:

2 =
R1

0.4384

<f ,Lf >

<f ,f >
P
(f (vi )f (vj ))2
i,j wij
P 2
i f (vi )
P
wij (f (vi )f (vj ))2
(vi ,vj )P

R2

2.5

0.6277

R3

f (vi ) = 0

>

0.4384

Table 1: Two different design for the original graph.

nf 2 (vmax )
wmin (f (vi )f (vj ))2

(vi ,vj )P

nf 2 (vmax )
wmin |P1 | (f (vmax )f (u))2
nf 2 (vmax )
t
2
wmin min
D (f (vmax )f (u))
nf 2 (vmax )
wmin tmin
1
D
n

where the 3rd inequality is obtained by Cauchy-Schwarz inequality [Dragomir, 2003]. Then the lemma follows.

From Table 1, we can see that:

Based on Lemma (3.1), we can see that a larger 2 entails

a smaller lower bound of D.

By increasing the capacity of the bottleneck road between node C and D, R2s travel time diameter D drops
from 3 to 2.5, meanwhile, its algebraic connectivity 2
increases from 0.4384 to 0.6277

Lemma 3.2 For a road network with travel time diamemax

ter D, algebraic connectivity 2 , and k = w
=
wmin
max{w1 ,...,wm }
min{w1 ,...,wm } .

Assume that the travel time diameter D

consists of l edges, and the corresponding edge lengths are
length1 , length2 , , lengthl . The travel time of each edge
road length
is calculated by travel time = road
capacity . Then we have:

R3 increases the capacity of the local road between node

A and B. However, both the travel time diameter D and
algebraic connectivity 2 of R3 are unchanged.
As illuminated by the above examples, the algebraic connectivity 2 is a measure of the whole connectivity of a graph.
In the next section, we will theoretically justify this issue by
developing the quantitative relationship between travel time
diameter D and algebraic connectivity 2 .

where e = k (length1 + length2 + + lengthl ).

3.4

Proof According to the Definition (1.1), the travel time diameter D can be expressed as this:

D e

The Quantitative Relationship between Travel

Time Diameter and Algebraic Connectivity 2

D=

As defined in Definition (1.1), the travel time diameter of the

road network is given by the maximum among all shortest
travel time between any possible origin-destination pairs. We
give two lemmas about the relationship between travel time
diameter D and algebraic connectivity 2 :

i,j

(f (vi ) f (vj ))

1
2

(3)

length2
lengthl
length1
+
+ +
w1
w2
wl

Then
1
2
l
D wmax = ( length
+ length
+ + length
w1
w2
wl ) wmax
k (length1 + length2 + + lengthl )

Lemma 3.1 For a road network with travel time diameter D,

and 2 be the algebraic connectivity of its Laplacian matrix
L, then
wmin tmin 1

(2)
D>
n
2

Since L is real symmetric, we can present the algebraic connectivity 2 in terms of Rayleigh quotient of L.
,Lf >
2 = <f
P<f ,f >
= i,j wij (f (vi ) f (vj ))2
P
2
wmax i,j (f (vi ) f (vj ))
P
2 1
e i,j (f (vi ) f (vj )) D

where wmin = min{w1 , ..., wm }, tmin = min{t1 , . . . , tm }.

Proof Let vmax denote the node with |f (vmax )|
maxi |f (vi )|, where f (vi ) = fi .

where e = k (length1 + length2 + + lengthl ).

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where the ij > 0 is the increment of the weight on edge l.

The partial derivative of 2 (L0 ) with respect to ij can be
expressed as below:

Based on Lemma (3.2), we can see that a larger 2 implies

a relatively smaller upper bound of D. With Lemma (3.1) and
(3.2), we could conclude the relationship between the travel
time diameter D and the algebraic connectivity 2 as follows:
an increment in 2 often leads to a decreasing in both the upper bound and lower bound of travel time diameter D simultaneously; A large 2 indicates a relatively tight bound on
travel time diameter. Hence a larger algebraic connectivity
2 indicates a better designed road network (i.e., with smaller
travel time diameter). It turns out that we could convert our
objective from the minimization of the travel time diameter
to the maximization of the algebraic connectivity 2 , under
certain constraints (e.g., limited budget).

3.5

L0
2 (L0 ) = f T
f
ij
ij
Based on Eq. (4), we have
L0
= al al T
ij
Combining Eq. (5) and (6), we have

(6)

2 (L0 ) = ((f (vi ) f (vj ))2

ij

Increasing the Algebraic Connectivity 2

According to the monotonicity w.r.t. the first derivatives, we

complete the proof.

In this section, we describe how to increase the algebraic connectivity 2 . And we make some definitions first.

Based on Lemma (3.5) and (3.6), we can get the relationship between the weight wij and the algebraic connectivity 2
of the network. After augmenting a road network, we could
guarantee its algebraic connectivity 2 would not decrease
(but it will not increase for sure). Moreover, we could optimize the algebraic connectivity 2 by adjusting the weights
selectively (e.g., increase the weights with nonzero partial
derivatives). Note that Lemma (3.6) also admits a nice geometric interpreting: recall that the Fiedler vector can be
considered as the geometric embedding of a graph. It turns
out that the algebraic connectivity is insensitive to the weight
changes between two points near to each other in the embedding. This observation meets the intuition that the short-cut
paths can far significantly improve the global connectivity of
road networks.

Definition 3.3 Assume G = (V, E) is an undirected graph

with nonnegative weights. Then the augmentation operation
for graph can be defined as an operation that increases a
weight with > 0 or adds a new positive weighted edge
on the graph.
Definition 3.4 Graph G0 is the augmented graph for G if G0
can be obtained by iteratively performing augmentation operations from G.
Lemma 3.5 Assume G = (V, E) is an undirected graph with
nonnegative weights. G0 is an augmented graph for G. And
their Laplacian matrices are L0 and L respectively. Then
2 (L) 2 (L0 )
Proof Let G0 = G0 G, and L0 be the Laplacian matrix of
G0 . By the definition of Laplacian matrix (Eq. (1)), we have
the following equation: L0 = L + L0 . Let X = {x|xT 1 =
0, |x| = 1}. Then the algebraic connectivity 2 of the augmented graph G0 is:

Designing the Road Network

In section 3.4, we have shown that the problem of minimization of travel time diameter could be converted to the maximization of the algebraic connectivity 2 under certain constraints (e.g., limited budget). More specifically, we can add
weights selectively to the road network according to Lemma
3.6 to maximize 2 . In this section, we propose several approaches that can decide which roads need to be upgraded
and the corresponding increments of their capacities in the
convex optimization framework. In practice, there are usually
various constraints when designing a road network, e.g., the
prohibition of the road capacity enhancement of certain road,
the limitation of the total budget and so on. In this paper,
without loss of generality, we adopt the budget constraints
in our optimization problems. In order to assess the amount
of costs for modifying the road network, we define the cost
coefficient matrix C, where each element cij represents the
per-unit cost to increase capacity on the corresponding road.
In practice, it may be difficult to construct a new road, i.e.,
to give a weight increment to a zero-weight edge. This fact
can be naturally modeled by assigning a large cost coefficient
to a zero-weight edge. Note that various constraints, e.g., the
prohibition of the road capacity enhancement of certain road,
can also be formulated by this scheme.
Based on spectral graph theory, the road network design
problem is to optimize the road network by selecting paths

2 (L0 ) = min{xT Lx + xT L0 x}
xX

min xT Lx + min xT L0 x
xX

(5)

xX

= 2 (L) + 2 (L0 )
Since 2 (L0 ) 0 always holds, we complete the proof.
Lemma 3.6 Let G = (V, E) be an undirected graph with
nonnegative weights and L be the corresponding Laplacian
matrix. The algebraic connectivity of G is 2 (L), and the
corresponding Fiedler vector is f . And f (vi ) denotes the ith
element of f . Then we have the following two propositions:
1. If (f (vi )f (vj ))2 = 0, then an increment of wij admits
an invariant 2 (L);
2. If (f (vi )f (vj ))2 > 0, then an increment of wij implies
a strict increment of 2 (L).
Proof For an edge l connecting nodes vi and vj , we define
the edge vector al Rn as ali = 1, alj = 1 and all other
entries 0. Then L0 can be calculated as below:
m
X
L0 = L +
ij al al T
(4)
l=1

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to improve or adding paths in the existing road network, i.e.,

maximize algebraic connectivity 2 as well as minimize the
modifying costs, under the budget constraint (less than B).
In Section 4.1, this optimization problem is reformulated into
several variants of semi-definite programming (SDP) problems with different objective functions.

4.1

However, in many cases, the road network design problem

also needs considering the limitation of the budget, instead of
only optimizing the algebraic connectivity in OP T2 . Therefore, we introduce another two variants of the road network
design problems, which can also be formulated as SDP and
hence solved globally by the SDP solvers.
Minimizing the budget: In some cases, we want to design the road network with the minimal budget under the constraint that 2 is not less than some pre-determined threshold
0 . We denote this problem as OP Tbudget . It can be formulated as below:
PP
minimize
cij (wij 0 wij )
0
wij wij , wij 0 = wji 0 ,
2 (L0 ) 0 ,
L0  0,
(10)
subject to
L0 1 = 0,
diag(L0 ) 0,
0
L diag(L0 ) 0.

Convex Optimization Method

Let the original road network be G, and the weight for each
edge (vi , vj ) be wij . Similarly, G0 is the designed road net0
, i, j
work and its corresponding weights are denoted as wij
{1, . . . , n}. Also assume that the total budget is B, and cost
coefficient matrix is C. Then the road network design problem to maximize the algebraic connectivity constrained by
limited budget, can be defined as below:
maximize

2 (L0 )
0
0
ij = wji ,
Pw
Pij wij , w
0
cij (wij wij ) B,
L0  0,
L0 1 = 0,
diag(L0 ) 0,
L0 diag(L0 ) 0.
0

subject to

Eq. (10) can be reformulated to the semi-definite program

(SDP) problem below:
PP
minimize
cij (wij 0 wij )
s(I 11T /n)  L0 ,
s >= 0 ;
wij 0 wij , wij 0 = wji 0 ,
(11)
subject to
L0  0,
0
L 1 = 0,
diag(L0 ) 0,
L0 diag(L0 ) 0.

(7)

where  denotes the matrix inequality, and or denotes

the element-wise inequality. We denote the problemof Eq.
(7) as OP T2 .
This problem can be reformulated to a semi-definite program(SDP). To see this, consider about this inequality:
s(I 11T /n)  L0

(8)

Multi-objective optimization: In some cases, we would

like to optimize the algebraic connectivity and budget simultaneously . More specifically, we incorporate the budget constraint into the objective function of OP T2 using a parameter , so that the difference between the algebraic connectivity 2 and expenditure for improvements is maximized. We
denote this problem as OP Tmulti :
PP
maximize 2 (L0 )
cij (wij 0 wij )
0
wij wij , wij 0 = wji 0 ,
L0  0,
(12)
L0 1 = 0,
subject to
0
diag(L ) 0,
L0 diag(L0 ) 0.

The eigenvalues of the Laplacian Matrix L are:

0 = 1 (L0 ) 2 (L0 ) n (L0 )
And the eigenvector corresponding to 1 (L0 ) is 1. Note that
the eigenvectors corresponding to all the other eigenvalues
(2 (L0 ) n (L0 )) are orthogonal to 1. It is easy to see that
the eigenvalues of the matrix L0 + s (11T /n) are:
s, 2 (L0 ) n (L0 )
Hence, Inequality (8) implies min{s, 2 (L0 )} s, which is
equivalent to s 2 (L0 ). It turns out that the problem can be
reformulated to the semi-definite program (SDP) as below:
maximize

subject to

s
s(I 11T /n)  L0 ,
wij 0 wij , wij 0 = wji 0 ,
PP
cij (wij 0 wij ) B,
L0  0,
L0 1 = 0,
diag(L0 ) 0,
L0 diag(L0 ) 0.

It is usually necessary to solve the OP Tmulti with several

different values of in order to obtain a satisfying solution.
And this question can be reformulated to the semi-definite
program (SDP) problem below:
PP
maximize
s
cij (wij 0 wij )
T
s(I 11 /n)  L0 ,
wij 0 wij , wij 0 = wji 0 ,
(13)
L0  0,
subject to
L0 1 = 0,
diag(L0 ) 0,
L0 diag(L0 ) 0.

(9)

Any standard SDP solver 1 could be used to solve the above

SDP problem (Eq. (9)). Note that the optimized variables are
the elements of L0 (e.g., all wi,j 0 ) and s.

Experimental Results and Analysis

In this section, we investigate the effectiveness of all

aforementioned models, namely OP T2 , OP Tbudget and

In this paper, we adopt the SeDuMi solver in CVX, which is

an open-source toolbox for convex optimization.

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(a) OP T2

(b) OP Tbudget

(c) OP Tmulti

Figure 1: (a) The travel time diameter and 2 of the road network designed under the budget limitation; (b) The travel time
diameter and minimal budget of the road network designed under the 2 constraint; (c) The travel time diameter, 2 and the
budget of the designed road network.

5.3

OP Tmulti , on simulated datasets. We also systematically

compare our method OP T2 with an existing method based
on a genetic algorithm [Zhang et al., 2008] [Yin, 2000] in
terms of travel cost, algebraic connectivity and travel time
diameter of the designed road network in different travel demands settings.
Experimental setup: First, we randomly generate a small
world network as the road network [Sienkiewicz and Holyst,
2005] by utilizing Watts-Strogatz mechanism [Watts and
Strogat, 1998], which has 50 nodes and each node only connects to 4 nearby nodes. The capacity for each road is a
random positive value, and the length of each road is set
to one. Recall that the travel time function is defined as:
road length
travel time = road
capacity . Without loss of generality, we
set all roads cost coefficient to one.

5.4

Our Approach vs Genetic Algorithm

As mentioned in Section 1, unlike most existing road design models [Yang and Bell, 1998], our method does not rely
on the existence of specific travel demands. In this experiment, we systematically compare our OP T2 with an existing method based on the genetic algorithm [Zhang et al.,
2008] [Yin, 2000] in terms of travel cost, algebraic connectivity and travel time diameter of the designed road network
on several demands. More specifically, we randomly generate
four travel demand matrices, where each element represents
the demand of traveling between the corresponding O-D pair.
For each demand, we design the road network with the budget constraint varying from 2 to 100. The results are shown
in the Fig. 2.
As shown Fig. 2(a)-2(d), in most cases, the travel time diameters obtained by genetic algorithm are much larger than
those in our approach. Moreover, our method shows a consistent reduction in travel time diameters of the optimal road
network along with an increasing budget, while the genetic
algorithm has much more fluctuations. From the perspective
of algebraic connectivity, Fig. 2(e)-2(h) also show that our
approach achieves better 2 than genetic algorithm with the
same budget limit. In terms of travel cost, the magnified parts
of Fig. 2(i)-2(l) show that: when the budget is relatively small
(less than 15), genetic algorithm outperforms OP T2 with a
smaller total travel cost. However, as the budget increases
(larger than 20), our approach achieves slightly better performance than genetic algorithm. This observation implies that
a global optimum can naturally meet most special travel demand if the cost constrain of global optimization is loose.

5.1 2 Maximization with Budget Constraint

In this case study, we compute the optimal solutions of 2 for
OP T2 (Eq. 7), where budget limitations varies from 2 to
100. The optimal travel time diameter and algebraic connectivity 2 with respect to each budget limitation are shown in
Fig. 1(a).
Fig. 1(a) shows that: with an increasing budget, the algebraic connectivity 2 tends to gradually increase, while the
travel time diameter of the road network would drop dramatically with relatively smaller budgets (less than 30) and then
decrease steadily. This result confirms the relationship between travel time diameter and 2 (Lemma 3.1 and 3.2).

5.2

Multi-objective Optimization

For the Multi-objective optimization model OP Tmulti described in Eq. (12), we compute the optimal solutions with
varies from 0.02 to 0.035. The travel time diameter, 2 and
budget of the optimal road network w.r.t. each are shown
in Fig. 1(c).
This result shows that allows us to make a tradeoff between the travel time diameter and budget in designing the
road network, i.e., with a small we relax the requirements
of budget in return for gaining the quality of connectivity, and
on the contrary, with a relatively large the limited budget is
emphasized instead of the connectivity of the road network.

Budget Minimization with 2 Constraint

In this section, the OP Tbudget model (Eq. 10) is tested on

the simulated road network to determine the minimal budget
constrained on a lower bound for 2 (changing from the original 2 (0.0336 in this case) to 5). The travel time diameter
and budget of each optimal road network are shown in Fig.
1(b).
Fig. 1(b) shows that: as the lower bound of 2 increases, the minimal budget for designing the road network
would increase as well. However, the travel time diameter of the refined road network tends to decreases gradually.
The OP Tbudget model allow us to solve the global minimal
budget under the constraint that 2 is not less than a predetermined threshold.

2874

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

(i)

(j)

(k)

(l)

Figure 2: (a)-(d) shows the travel time diameters of the road network designed by the OP T2 and the genetic algorithm with
four randomly generated different demands w.r.t varied budget constraints (from 2 to 100). (e)-(h) and (i)-(l) show the results
of algebraic connectivity and total travel cost respectively. Note travel demands are not used in OP T2 .
In summary, the genetic algorithm is to design a road network so as to fit certain demand, while our convex optimization method (OP T2 ) focus on optimizing the algebraic connectivity which is independent of any specific demand. And
our convex optimization method is both efficient and universal in solving MNDP problems.

under certain constraints. This reformulation leads to a semidefinite program, in which we can get its global solution easily. In the experimental part, we generate a small world network to represent the road network, and design it in several
scenarios. The results confirm our theoretical justifications
above. Finally, we empirically show that our method is an
efficient and universal method to design road network by systematically comparing our method with an existing method
based on the genetic algorithm.

Conclusion

In practice, the smaller travel time diameter a road network

has, the more efficient the road network will be. Inspired by
this intuition, the minimization of network travel time diameter with respect to certain constraints is our main objective for
designing a road network. However, it is difficult to solve this
problem directly. In spectral graph theory, we theoretically
prove that the diameter of the road network can be bounded
by the algebraic connectivity, i.e., the upper and lower bounds
of travel time diameter are proportional to the inverse of algebraic connectivity. Therefore, we could convert our objective from the minimization of the road network travel time
diameter to the maximization of the algebraic connectivity

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